One of the emails contained in the October 7 Wikileaks email release shows Grunwald Communications asking Hillary Clinton’s press secretary about the candidate’s support for “a 25 percent tax on gun sales.”
The email is dated October 4, 2015 and was sent from Mandy Grunwald to Brian Fallon. In it, Grunwald asked about Clinton’s reported vacillation on gun control in the 2008 campaign and also about the tax. She said, “I also saw something about her supporting a 25% tax on gun sales back in 1993.”
ABC News reports that Clinton was “unequivocal” in her support for such a tax during her husband’s presidency. On June 5, 2016, she told George Stephanopoulos her support for the tax was part of the nationalized healthcare push. She said, “What I was saying back then was that we have a lot of public health costs that taxpayers end up paying for through Medicaid, Medicare, through uncompensated care, because that was in the context of the push for health care reform and that we needed some way to try to defray those costs.”
But Clinton’s comments to Stephanopoulos were as rooted in the present as they were in the past. For example, she referenced meeting with San Bernardino terror attack survivors, then said:
When you have mass shootings, you not only have the terrible deaths, you have people who are injured. What they talked to me about was, where do they get the financial support to deal with both the physical and the emotional trauma. You know, is it a workman’s comp support, which is one of the arguments? Is it private insurance, Is it because they work for the county, something the county should pay for?
It must be noted that Clinton’s 25 percent tax on gun sales would make poorer people less safe by pricing them out of the ability to be armed for self-defense. After all, a 25 percent tax on a $400 gun is $100–and that would be in addition to other taxes that are due at the state level.
This is perfect example of the fallacy that gun controllers peddle when they present new gun laws as something that will make people less vulnerable. In truth, gun control only puts the vulnerable in a worse position. Clinton’s gun tax would do this by simply making guns too expensive for many law-abiding, low income residents to afford.
AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.
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